


dealing with a heart I didn't break

by cashewdani



Category: New Girl
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-02
Updated: 2012-07-02
Packaged: 2017-11-10 19:44:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/469962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cashewdani/pseuds/cashewdani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They throw you an anniversary party, a year to the day you moved in</p>
            </blockquote>





	dealing with a heart I didn't break

**Author's Note:**

  * For [torigates](https://archiveofourown.org/users/torigates/gifts).



> This was supposed to be a happy fic, with makeouts, and then this happened. Written for , even though she deserves better.

They throw you an anniversary party, a year to the day you moved in, and it’s nostalgic and sweet and you see so many things that have happened between these walls, between these people, too many things even for just a year, despite how there’s just one candle in Schmidt’s cake in front of you.

And you try to make a toast about that, about all the growing you’ve done, and the person they’ve helped to let you be, but it all comes out a little wrong and you can’t help but think that it sounds like you’ve got a long way still to go.

Nick puts on “Time of My Life” and asks you to dance and Winston wants someone to inform him just when exactly they stole his iPod, and you laugh about it even though you feel a little bit like crying.

***

You can’t help it that you sometimes spend an afternoon into evening into night lying on your bed with Schmidt’s computer, stalking Spencer through social media. He doesn’t have a Facebook because he now believes his true friends will be able to follow his life without the use of a computer, but there’s still a profile on MySpace for a spencemakessense, and you look at the pictures of a barely adult him and it’s not entirely clear which of you is more messed up. Sure he dressed up like a Juggalo, but you’re here in your bedroom a decade later caring about it.

His phone number exists only in your mind as the first three digits, and that’s probably for the best, and Cece was right to make you delete it from your cell, but also, what if you really need to call him. What if he dies and no one ever tells you about it. What if he’s already dead right now.

And then it gets a little claustrophobic and hard to breathe because you’re being bombarded with loneliness and regret and uncertainty and just as you’re so sure you’re nearly over him, you are still obsessing over what you could have done to save the relationship.

Your options are crying about it and writing some angsty journal entries that would put your middle school kids to shame or just reminding yourself that you’re an independent woman who doesn’t have the time for this.

It’s unfortunate that you do.

You really, really do.

***

Insomnia is something you deal with sometimes when you get your period, if it’s not one of those months where all you want to do is sleep for three to five days. It’s almost like mania, how you need to clean out all the cabinets and knit a sweater and maybe learn Italian, because, well, it might be pretty neat to speak Italian.

You don’t, however, learn Italian, and only Schmidt cleans those cabinets, and you’ve crafted two sweaters since last fall but neither of them at night. Because Nick has insomnia sometimes too, or as he calls it, a side effect of having to be at work until 3. But he doesn’t want to do anything. He wants to sit in the almost dark, hoping sleep will come, and so you sit there too, still and quiet and just vibrating right under the surface.

He likes game shows from when you were kids. Half hour long advertisements for things neither of you would ever use in the kitchen. Second airings of late night talk shows. You learn about the new movie Liam Neeson has coming out and how much Nick hates guacamole and that the survey says flowers are the best way to apologize to a woman you’ve disappointed.

You don’t get enlightened about why Nick will hold your knee or why it changes the rhythm of your pulse. Just a little.

***

You can’t ask Nick if he feels the same way about Caroline, or the lack of Caroline more specifically, that you feel about the lack of Spencer, because it’s sad to do that. To admit something like that out loud. To make Nick have to not only identify his own feelings, but to compare them to yours. Synthesizing is the highest order of thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy, you’ve looked at that chart for every lesson plan you’ve ever written, and you can’t ask Nick to do that in the middle of the night, or while he’s eating breakfast, or when you’re driving in the car.

There’s no right time to make someone pull off their bandage and show you the wound underneath that should have definitely healed by now, just for comparison’s sake.

But that starts being the thing that keeps your eyes open at 2 am. Not your hormones or your cycle or the pull of the moon on the tides.

How deep is the slice over Nick’s heart? Is it a straight line, or jagged and gnarly, which is a word you’ve only thought of in relation to injuries or trees? Is the blood in it red and fresh and new or does it look crusted and dark and the color of swamps left uninterrupted?

You sometimes rub the spot where your own scar should be, if the skin would seal closed at last on your left breast. And sometimes you rub between your legs, and sometimes you come, thinking about Nick and his damage, and how you might be the same in all the ways that matter.


End file.
